


a thousand teeth, and yours among them I know

by mollivanders



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Depression, F/M, Ghosts, Haunting, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, post-s4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 05:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19986604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: She’d never really questioned her teenage dreams of Lilly before, hadn’t thought to cross-examine the evidence in front of her. There was so much she had ignored, had skipped over, in her own self-interest and need to survive. Now, she knows Lilly is waiting – and she’s not the only one. Her mother calls out from across the house, and is gone when Veronica gets there; her father’s future ghost is on her heels. Lilly is her rock, her standby, ready and waiting, and the chorus of dead schoolmates take turns at their haunting. Veronica knows it’s beyond fucked up, can practically hear Logan yelling at her to talk to someone, anyone breathing, and maybe it really is his voice she’s hearing and yet –She hasn’t seen him yet.(She’s waiting to see him.)





	a thousand teeth, and yours among them I know

**Author's Note:**

> I did a bad thing, but then, Rob Thomas did a bad thing first. I'm just trying to work with the wreckage. Set post-S4; this is my way of preparing to deal with it so it's basically an AU. Definite warnings for mental health/depression. I also play with the fact that in S1 of the show Veronica canonically dreams of Lilly regularly and even sees her ghost while she's awake. Title comes from Hozier's 'In A Week'.

Her life has always been built upon ghosts, counting like them sheep as she falls asleep.

Sometimes she wonders what her purpose in life is if not to chase ghosts; lets the thought linger just long enough to make herself shudder before turning to Logan, blissfully asleep beside her. She envies him his rest, how well he sleeps these days, and nudges him awake. He moves to her touch, responsive even half-asleep, and she loses herself in the life they’re building together, the one she might just let herself have.

Later – in the aftermath – she knows she really should have known better.

(She’s Veronica Mars; she does not get a happy ending.)

+

The pain of it comes from more places than she can count, but one she can name – there’s nothing to throw herself into here. The mystery is nothing such; the murderer known and identified and locked away with more certainty than Veronica ever let herself have with Lilly. Maybe it’s unfair, that Logan’s death doesn’t reshape her life the way Lilly’s had, but fair isn’t something she’s come to rely on anyway.  


Someone has to pay – someone is paying.

(It’s not enough.)

It’s even less than _enough_ when the dreams begin.

+

She hasn’t seen Lilly in years, a ghost laughing around corners, not since she was a teenager fraught with her first traumas. The Kanes have all but disappeared from Neptune, but few things ground her the way a vendetta does. To Veronica, vendettas look like Kanes, in all their forms, and it’s a guilty thought she can’t escape. In the absence of their wake, she becomes unmoored, tossing and turning in her now too-large bed, avoiding the missed calls on her phone and spiraling back, back to her teenage years and wondering just what sign she missed that if she’d seen it, heeded it, she could have avoided all of this. Was it coming back to Neptune? Was it becoming friends with Lilly? Was it something darker, something she can’t yet face?

(The answer is – yes, yes, yes.)

She still can’t pin it down – until her first ghost pins it down for her.

(She’s never forgotten her first.)

+

Lilly is bright and full of mischievous sunshine, all of sixteen and life and death at once, and all Veronica can think is how old she must seem to her until she catches a glimpse of herself and finds herself fifteen, unbroken and naïve and wishful. Lilly laughs outright at the look on her face and Veronica flinches as if she’d been slapped.

“Did you forget me after all?” Lilly asks, tracing a line across Veronica’s jaw, and she shivers as though it’s her grave that’s been walked over, and not her dead friend’s. “I warned you, Veronica Mars. You left me behind.”

“I didn’t,” Veronica whispers, aching and lost, and Lilly cheshire grins as if it’s no big deal. It’s a lie, and most of all to herself.

“You did!” Lilly says dismissively, and flips open a magazine. Chad Michael Murray’s face is plastered across the cover and Veronica feels her sense of balance tip, thrown out of time. “You _replaced_ me.” She grins wickedly, but doesn’t look at Veronica.

Veronica’s horrified, but something in her gut agrees; something worse lingers just out of sight; a trademark psychotic jackass lurking at the door. He flickers away, forgotten faster than Lilly ever was, and Veronica lets out a sob.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Lilly says, “I knew you would. It happens.”

Veronica doesn’t need to be told. She had to fill the void Lilly left behind; she had to go on living. She just knows, deep inside, Lilly can’t forgive that after all, Veronica lived and Lilly didn’t.

“I had to,” Veronica admits quietly, long hair falling across her face.

“It’s alright,” Lilly says, a wicked glint in her eyes as she meets Veronica’s gaze. “I got the guy in the end after all.”

It’s a sucker punch, but it doesn’t land, Veronica drinking in Lilly with hungry eyes.

“I wanted to be like you,” Veronica says. “I wanted you to stay.”

“Tough luck,” Lilly says, eyes snapping to Veronica’s –

+

Veronica wakes with a start, cold sweat coating her body, and races to the bathroom before emptying her stomach, a sour taste burning her throat. She hasn’t really been eating since _it_ happened, hasn’t taken care, and it’s beginning to show. It’s a different kind of loss than before, no parent standing by to pick her up and make sure she’s getting three square a day. She wants to feed off her anger, but all she finds there is loss, and after all the loss she’s fed on – it doesn’t fill the way she remembers.

When she slides back into sleep, Lilly’s waiting for her.

+

She’d never really questioned her teenage dreams of Lilly before, hadn’t thought to cross-examine the evidence in front of her. There was so much she had ignored, had skipped over, in her own self-interest and need to survive. Now, she knows Lilly is waiting – and she’s not the only one. Her mother calls out from across the house, and is gone when Veronica gets there; her father’s future ghost is on her heels. Lilly is her rock, her standby, ready and waiting, and the chorus of dead schoolmates take turns at their haunting. Veronica knows it’s beyond fucked up, can practically hear Logan yelling at her to talk to someone, anyone breathing, and maybe it really is his voice she’s hearing and yet –

She hasn’t seen him yet.

(She’s waiting to see him.)

+

It’s not long until Lilly doesn’t keep to dreams, and Veronica knows she’s truly in the land of monsters. Lilly doesn’t speak to her in this life, never did before, but she hears her all the same, laughing as she rounds a street corner, blonde hair streaming behind her, blood still spattered over her pep squad uniform. The more things change –

“Are you okay?” Keith asks, eyeing her critically over her desk. He’d come in to finish paperwork, and any chance of hiding the bags under her bloodshot eyes goes out the window the moment he appeared. “Veronica, you’d tell me if – ”

She cracks a quip, but all she wants to do is scream at him – of _course_ she wasn’t okay, how couldn’t he _see_ that, did she have to tell him _everything_? He was a detective, for fuck’s sake, and he’d never seen the damage to his daughter in front of him. Worse, if he knew, he’d never look at her the same; she knows, down in her bones, there are limits to how much he could handle. She’d never tell him; she never had; never would. The worst things that had happened to her were hers alone.

(Were Lilly’s – Logan’s – all the ghosts that weighed her down – all theirs together.)

He doesn’t really look convinced, but he also doesn’t press the issue, painfully reliable in this, and once more she’s left to the quiet of her demons. It’s something, at least.

(Far away, Lilly laughs, inviting Veronica to come play.)

+

“Do you ever wonder why you’re still here?” Lilly asks. They’re lounging by the side of the pool where she’d been murdered, and Veronica knows she should be horrified.

(All she can feel is a vague longing, something lost in the middle distance.)

“You mean when everyone else is gone?” Veronica asks, the chorus of names circling her like a fog. Lilly, of course; her mother, somewhere down a dark hole; Duncan, across the world; Meg, by more than death; Mac, by more than life; all gone in their own way. The last name sits at the edge of her tongue and she tastes the memory of him, trying to hold on. _Don’t forget me_ , Lilly had begged, and _I could never_ echoes across the broken record of their lifespan.

(How quickly they all fade – except for Lilly. Except – one other.)

“Exactly that,” Lilly says, and Veronica understands this game. Lilly is not her ghost, not her memory, not her sanity gone over the rails. Lilly is an invitation; Lilly has always been an invitation, to plunge into the unknown and never come back quite the same. “Do you wish you could come?”

“No,” says Veronica, and that much is true – but also it is true, at least a little, and she hears it in her answer, that some deep part of her wants to stay, here in this dream. “No,” she repeats, less sure, and jerks her gaze across the pool to where Logan Echolls is glaring at her.

“Veronica,” he says, harshly, and yet somehow as only he could say her name. “ _Wake up._ ”

+

She’d never seen him that clearly before – in dreams, and maybe not even in life. She wakes, covered in a cold sweat as always, and fights the urge to curl up into a ball. Instead she stares up, into the darkness, and as her eyes adjust her brain fights back.

_It’s not possible._

(None of it was possible.)

Whether it was or not, she wanted it to be.

She’d made a lot of how she was her mother’s daughter, an addict who could never quite let go of her obsessions. Well, if that was true, she was also her father’s daughter, who could never quit when he was ahead, a dog with a bone. What that made her in the middle, she wasn’t sure –

(A creature of longing, and of dreams, and vengeance.)

But Logan’s voice still echoed in her head, pulling her away – pulling her home – pulling her somewhere new.

+

“Mars, you don’t look so good,” Wallace says flatly, taking a look around the house. He’d come over, unannounced, and Veronica found her walls overcome in a single step.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she snarked and Wallace shrugged, bypassing her venom to set groceries on the counter. She hadn’t even noticed them at first.

“Go take a shower,” he instructed, and began the process of clearing out take-out containers. “Get dressed. Then we’re having a talk.”

He means well – he always means well – and if Veronica was in her right mind she’d listen to him. What he doesn’t know is that every day, Lilly’s invitation looks better and better.

(At least he’s trying – he among the living.)

+

“I love you,” Veronica whispers, eyes locked on Logan. She can’t remember if she ever told him that in life; always ready with a quip or a snarky response. He’d only ever been open and earnest; too open and earnest. In this dream, he’s just eighteen, swinging a tire iron in one hand and looking menacing. It’s how she imagines him from the police report, the night Felix died.

(It’s how he’s lived in half her memories; still does.)

“He was a bad idea, Veronica,” Lilly says, turning to look at Veronica. “You should have stayed with Duncan. We’d be sisters.”

Hot anger flares in Veronica, anger she doesn’t want to examine after all these years.

“Duncan _left_ ,” she says with insistence. Left with his child, disappeared half-way around the world; still closer than Lilly.

“That wouldn’t have stopped me,” Lilly says with a quirk of her mouth that tugs at Veronica’s heartstrings.

“No, it wouldn’t have,” Veronica whispers, and lays her head back down. Across the dream, Logan lingers, an entirely different invitation playing across his lips. Inside the dream, Veronica drifts off, finding a semblance of rest at last. It reshapes her, calling her home, and she smiles in her twice sleep, almost peaceful.

+

“Why are you here?” she asks of them both, her two most potent ghosts, her best loves in life and in death. “Why did you stay?” They’re all in Lilly’s old bedroom tonight, Logan leaning against the door frame, his eyes full of judgment – though at her or Lilly, she doesn’t know. Maybe neither. Maybe something else she can’t understand in this half-life state, buried in memories.

(Some part of her knows _he doesn’t want her here_. She doesn’t want to know more than that.)

Logan doesn’t speak – he never does until the end – but Lilly leans closer across the mess of nail polish bottles and magazines and curls a finger through Veronica’s hair.

“I want _you_ to stay,” she says, without a hint of humor, and Veronica shivers, ducking her eyes. _Stay_.

Suddenly Logan interrupts, an irreverent vision pushing his presence into the room.

“ _Live,_ Veronica,” he swears, and for the first time she hears the anguish in his voice. “Live, _please_.”

Flipping on the bed, she pulls him to her, and suddenly Lilly isn’t there, it isn’t Lilly’s room, they aren’t teenagers anymore. The setting is familiar; their would-be home, their would-be life together. It’s all he’d ever wanted, and if she wanted it in truth, she’d wanted it too late.

(Wanted it in dreams more than anything.)

“Why didn’t _you_ stay?” she asks angrily, and he flinches but doesn’t back off. “Why are we _here_ , Logan?”

“You decide,” he says quietly, and at the brush of his lips against her forehead she snaps awake, sobbing into her pillow like she hadn’t since he first left.

+

The dream is almost empty now. Everyone else has become vague shadows, and Lilly has switched places with Logan, watching them from across the parking lot. Veronica watches her in turn, never far afield from her heart, even here. She’s curled up next to his memory, that horrible yellow Hummer a cocoon against the world, and says nothing. He echoes her, unable to break the spell until she does, and even in dreams, Veronica’s decided no more than this.

“People can’t go on forever,” she says finally, and imagines his arms tightening around her. “Not when they lose everyone they love.”

“Not everyone,” he whispers in the shell of her ear and _she won’t cry, she won’t_ ; tears are not for dreams.

“Everyone,” she affirms.

He doesn’t argue after that.

+

Mars Investigations shutters with barely a whimper, much less a bang. Her father doesn’t ask questions and neither does Cliff; only Vinnie bothers her with jokes about not cutting it as a P.I.

“That’s right,” she says, locking the door and facing him. He takes a step back, and she wonders what lingers in her eyes these days. Just out of sight, her ghosts are calling.

“You’re a good P.I., Mars,” Vinnie says, serious for the first time, before switching gears. “So you let me know if you ever want to come work for me.”

Her answer’s carried by the wind, but he gets the message.

+

Of course she leaves Neptune. It’s what she does in a crisis without action; she runs. There are no monsters to expose, no villains to accuse, all her work done. This much Veronica has learned – without a purpose, she cannot outrun her ghosts.

(For now – she doesn’t want to.)

And for now – they go where she goes; memories and more lingering inside her. Last time, she fled north; this time, she just drives. She can’t outrun Neptune; she can’t outrun her losses, shaped like warmth and a haunting all at once. She brings them with her, learns to bear the load as only Lianne’s daughter could; fixes to her wishful purpose as only Keith’s daughter would. Maybe somewhere in the middle, she’ll bury her ghosts, or be buried with them.

(For now – she carries her ghosts with her.)

_Finis_

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly one of my pet peeves in writing is when a character suffers trauma and then a time jump skips over the aftermath. If you're going to screw with your characters (fans), you need to do the work to actually tell the story. I wanted to write this _before_ jumping into the story knowing we have a time jump; it may totally not work but it's what I needed to write for myself.


End file.
